Key Quotations from The Liars Club

  1. "My sharpest memory is of a single instant surrounded by dark" (1).
  2. "I looked at my father, who would have climbed straight up those bleachers and gutted this boy like a fish, and at my mother, who for some reason I imagined bursting into tears and locking herself in the bathroom over the whole thing" (67).
  3. "She was carrying a sketch pad the size of a small card table, like she was planning to draw the fisherman, but I knew with a cold certainty while I stood ankle deep in that lukewarm water that she was climbing up there to get drunk" (109).
  4. "Let me tell you about the smell in that room. It stank of snake, specifically water moccasin" (86).
  5. "It was a hard run in the deep sand from the waterline to the steps of the Breeze Inn. My feet sank and couldn't get traction, like the run in a bad dream" (114 ).
  6. "Why don't you go in and ask your mother if she wants to head over to Bridge City for some barbeque crabs" (137).
  7. "She upends the last box of toys and shakes it the way, earlier in our room, she dumped out each drawer from our highboy" (151).
  8. "I finally told Daddy I didn't want Mother to come home if she was gonna go crazy all over again, just because we hadn't cleaned our room" (171).
  9. "I was certain that I'd die without Daddy around" (200).
  10. "On that day I watched steady, for Daddy's pounding on Hector made me truly glad" (288).

 

Quotations from Mary Karr about
The Liars Club


  1. "Leechfield is a myfthical place, rather than an actual place on the map. Because my mother still lives in the house I was raised in, I leave it at that."
  2. " I tried to write it as novel, but I don't know anything about novels. And the character who was supposed to be me behaved way better in fiction than I ever did in fact. She was beautiful and noble and wise, she knew calculus, and did charity work in a nursing home in her spare time -- all this in sixth grade."
  3. "She's [my mother] a big fan, even though much of it was painful for her to read."
  4. " I hope there will be a movie . . . since I need the money. But since I'm as ignorant about movies as I am about novels, I can only hope Cindy Crawford plays me at age seven. They could have baboons play my family if they would pay me."
  5. "... the depth and the detail and the richness of the memories, and sometimes the misery, did surprise me. Events I thought would take a few pages often took several chapters, because the memories kept unpacking in my head."

     

     

    Source : Barnes and Noble Chat Transcripts : http://www.barnesandnoble.com/community/archive/transcript.asp?userid=1N1K95432P&mscssid=623507N53US12LF900CGNDBPB2J2A06D&pcount=0&srefer=&eventId=1595